Vulnerabilities
Side-Channel Attack
Also known as: Side channel
Definition
An attack that recovers secrets from a system by observing physical or implementation characteristics — timing, power, electromagnetic emissions, caches, acoustic signals — rather than logical flaws.
Examples
- Timing differences in MAC comparison revealing key bits.
- Rowhammer, Spectre, Meltdown — microarchitectural side channels.
Related terms
Timing Attack
A side-channel attack that recovers secret information by measuring how long an operation takes under different inputs.
Spectre
A family of microarchitectural attacks that abuse CPU speculative execution to leak data across security boundaries via cache-based side channels.
Meltdown
A microarchitectural vulnerability (CVE-2017-5754) that lets unprivileged code read kernel memory by exploiting out-of-order execution and a delayed permission check.
Rowhammer
A hardware vulnerability in DRAM where repeatedly activating one memory row causes bit flips in physically adjacent rows, undermining memory integrity.
Cryptography
The science of securing information through mathematical techniques that provide confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation in the presence of adversaries.
Fault Injection
A class of physical or logical attacks that deliberately induce abnormal conditions in hardware or software to bypass security checks or leak secrets.